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This is already a real issue with many existing public chatbots.

Take r/replika for example, they’re constantly getting posts from users who think their chatbot partner is real. It’s the first question in their FAQ.

The mods keep needing to post reminders. [0] Even in this post, there are many commenters (if you scroll down) who don’t believe the mods.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/replika/comments/r5t0wk/so_you_thin...

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I have been suspicious that services like Replika use an army of chatters in the background to respond to certain questions.

They’re pretty clear that this is not the case. However, that doesn’t stop our imaginations going wild as per the GP’s point. It’s impressive how good these bots are compared to the state of the art 10 years ago.

https://help.replika.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001070971-Is-t...

It's partially the price point which has lead me to believe that Replika may not be being 100% truthful. There have been text based answering services for decades charging 10 cents to respond to a text message. While I don't doubt the majority is ML driven, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few human responses.

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